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ልዩ ጉዞ ... ... In the last analysis; IT IS Just An IDEA! IS IT ? It is up to YOU!Sat, 27 Jan 2018 10:05:17 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/e4a534361421c7099d8c7c04ae07afc6?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngልዩ ጉዞ … liyu-guzo > the Journey > le Voyage …https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com
The Anthropology of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonementhttps://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/the-anthropology-of-rene-girard-and-traditional-doctrines-of-atonement/
https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/the-anthropology-of-rene-girard-and-traditional-doctrines-of-atonement/#respondSun, 15 Jun 2014 16:29:35 +0000http://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/?p=87625295Continue reading →]]>“Mine is a search for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate orthodox theology” (R. Girard on The Girard Reader p. 288)

]]>https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/the-mimetic-theory-of-rene-girard-part-i/feed/0hilinabThe method behind thinkinghttps://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/the-method-behind-thinking/
https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/the-method-behind-thinking/#respondWed, 11 Jun 2014 19:36:15 +0000http://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/?p=87625280Continue reading →]]>In the Gorgias (475d), Socrates tells Polus to “submit [himself] nobly/bravely to the logos as to a doctor“. At the root of Socratic praxis is the therapeia of the soul. Once a vital truth has been uncovered, one must affirm it and live into it. Not to do so is a sign that one still has some growing up to do. So these are the four steps: Ask a vital question. Give voice to what you believe. Give voice to second thoughts. Submit yourself to what you learn along the way.A powerful methodology indeed.

Dosteowsky, who forsaw, how ” Almost in the wink of an eye , after the Russian revolution, the total freedom proclaimed by the Bolsheviks was metamorphosed into total sevitude.” (*

“Genuine prophecy always sounds a little indecent to those whose minds are closed to its truth”(* as we are still witnessing in Ethiopia today after all what took place in our generation and to our generation!

Translated by James G. Williams (Michigan State University Press, 2012)…. A wonderful long essay! Don’t miss it, if you want to look behind the curtains of alleged “big” historical events and cultural processes

– a must read for those who have authentically and honestly made a real trouble of reflecting on our past 50 years of Ethiopian Experience, social, political as well as deeply personal!!

His (Girard’s) mimetic theory as applied on Dosteovsky’s literature. True! “Mimetic theory as a theory of evolution as applied to the origins of culture. ….mimetic crisis, sacrifice , and coversion” (G. Williams, the translator)

Specially recomendable for our “literature” corners who are daring to write this or that piece on their perceptions and experiences! History pieces as well! May be too late (if that is all they have to say!) for:-

….. …… “Circumstances cause Dostoevsky to overturn his earlier ideas and examine them in a new light, and so in some ways the works of Dostoevsky’s middle period are all about seeing through the society-induced lies of his own earlier texts from a time when he mimicked the literary desires of others. Dostoevsky’s life was not without an excess of pride and humiliation, and we see that his genius was born from past mistakes that many perhaps would not learn from, but that this great and truly self-searching intellect did indeed take to heart. Girard’s book ends in Christian revelation, as Dostoevsky himself in The Brothers Karamazov reconciles a lifetime’s worth of ideas with scripture, seeing beyond the popular literary and social theories of his day and revealing a universal human truth. It is this human truth which still marks Dostoevsky out as one of the most psychologically perceptive authors who ever lived.”0*/

]]>https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/friedenspreis-fur-jaron-lanier/feed/0hilinablanierlanier-musicAGAIN, High Time for Dostoewsky !https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/high-time-for-dostoewsky-2/
https://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/high-time-for-dostoewsky-2/#respondSat, 24 May 2014 16:49:51 +0000http://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/?p=87625204Continue reading →]]>Dostoeswsky is a prophet in his way and Rene Girard (“one of the ‘forty immortals’ of the French Academy”) is the one who may have interpreted him at best! See Rene-Girard-on-Dostoevsky:-

Translated by James G. Williams (Michigan State University Press, 2012)

*

……. “In Notes from the Underground the character of the officer, a minor obstacle and humiliation in the author’s life, takes on, due to pride, immense importance. Until the author can be the officer, can become one with him, the author hates the officer and sees him as a godlike opponent.
Likewise, Stavrogin, the man admired and coveted by young revolutionaries in Dostoevsky’s Demons, becomes a godlike figure to some. People admire Stavrogin as they would a cult leader, and gladly humiliate themselves before him. Dostoevsky had a famous flash of prescience in Demons, foreseeing the Stalinist regime to which the actions of such revolutionaries would lead: a man made God and a nation bowing down in humiliated worship.
Desire comes from others; desire leads to conflict; and all this happens atop a pattern of worship set in motion by the Bible. Western Civilisation’s idea of Christ becomes its greatest poison. All these acts of pride, humiliation and mimetic desire occur beneath the surface, they are concealed, and so Girard aptly calls these ideas, in line with Dostoevsky, underground thoughts.”

….. …… “Circumstances cause Dostoevsky to overturn his earlier ideas and examine them in a new light, and so in some ways the works of Dostoevsky’s middle period are all about seeing through the society-induced lies of his own earlier texts from a time when he mimicked the literary desires of others. Dostoevsky’s life was not without an excess of pride and humiliation, and we see that his genius was born from past mistakes that many perhaps would not learn from, but that this great and truly self-searching intellect did indeed take to heart. Girard’s book ends in Christian revelation, as Dostoevsky himself in The Brothers Karamazov reconciles a lifetime’s worth of ideas with scripture, seeing beyond the popular literary and social theories of his day and revealing a universal human truth. It is this human truth which still marks Dostoevsky out as one of the most psychologically perceptive authors who ever lived.”0*/

I am sure “the Ethiopian revolution and the Ethiopian student movement” all through is full of such material … but most of it has perhaps not the “fate or the fortune” of surviving the process…..in a form of literature (2 like elsewhere on the globe, so that the next generation could have learnt from it.

Nonetheless, since the theory… and the scholar observation makes IT in such a way

available (cf. Rene Girard and Doseoswsky) , I hope the coming generation may benefit from the rest too, if we indicate them the where-abouts…… That is also my intention here. Hoping it will fetch and find the right mind to learn from the past…. But as you are certainly observing the whole phenomena….the Ethiopian elite…the Ethiopian polity is still submerged/contained in the “Schlamssel”/ in the mess and not ready to quit the correspnding boxes!

*

However, I remain hoping that one day, looking at their mirrors, our “heroes” would also dare to smile at their own pictures to make the leap of taking their “enemies” (imagined) into account rather than themselves.

“When we consider the seventy years in the twentieth century his country was in the hands of its revolutionaries trying to build a Communist utopia, we cannot fail to discern in the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky a prophetic dimension — and one in which we may behold an image of our own culture’s controversies even after the fall of communism. The crisis he explored in nineteenth-century Russia’s belated and vexed encounter with Europe foreshadows the critical confrontations of our own time, as we face the decline of traditional religious, political, and epistemological authority while lost in a fog of competing claims about scientific determinism, groundless freedom, and the latest fashionable ideology.“

1) What a coincidence for more reflection (without “bad faith”) that the two books are published almost at the same period!The first (Zewde), a historical sketch of a social movement for social justice, apt, opted or condemned to deconstruct an old nation-state; unaware of a systemic in-built global relations of political forces (with or without complicity). (- A fact surprisingly missed by the author himself too; as if the agents are moving in a global political space, devoid of heavy-weight political players wrestling for hegemony (cultural or economic)).The second (Asserate) depicting the painstaking process of building a nation-state in a volatile and embattled political space resulting in a regime, at the coming of age unable to reform itself !2) It can be noted these days, that years 2013 & 2014 have come up with some interesting (autobiographic) literature reviewing the unhappy past of the last 50 years!

“For Hölderlin, the harmony of the natural and historical world is not something given, but something that one has to be trained to perceive amidst the facticity of suffering and violence. The deliberate confusion of Hölderlin’s poetry, triggered by complex syntactical structures and a dense semantic texture, challenges the human mind to find evidence of the divine in its own mental and poetic self-organization. Disjunction and chaos eventually triumph over organization, leading to a form of aesthetic exercise that undermines rather than bolsters a conception of nature and history as self-organizing, harmonious systems.”

I made up my mind to dig into papers on the chronicles of the Oromos and related, which are at least available at the moment on the internet.

–

As much as “The Question of Eritrea” was a significant theme of the political discourse of the last generation, with the outcome we are well acquainted with today, “The Oromo Question” may as well play a major role in the political deliberations of the present Ethiopian generation. Whether some of us would like to consider “nationalism” in its narrow regional perspective ( not to use the concept called “narrow” nationalism) to be anachronistic in the coming 21st century, vis a vis being a significant regional global player (or at the least to escape being a playing ball of bigger political entities), one has nonetheless to be fully aware of the “Oromo politcal discourse” to assume a pragmatic political activity with all the backdrops of the concrete Ethiopian political reality and its constituencies!

Find a few of the collections I happened to access in the folllowing link:-